NASA's Mars rover Curiosity took this photograph of a possible meteorite, often called "Ames Knob," on Jan. 12, 2017.
Credit score: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSNASA's Mars rover Curiosity has stumbled onto one other rock that probably fell from area.
The article is a small, dark-gray spot among the many reddish rock and dust that make up the Martian floor, so it caught mission scientists' eyes. They named the mysterious rock Ames Knob and zapped it with Curiosity's laser-firing spectrometer, often called ChemCam, to find out its composition.
"You'll be able to even see the three spots within the picture of Ames Knob the place the ChemCam laser zapped the goal," NASA spokesman Man Webster, from the company's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, advised House.com through electronic mail. (JPL manages Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission.) [Amazing Mars Photos by NASA's Curiosity Rover (Latest Images)]
ChemCam's outcomes recommend that Ames Knob is an iron-nickel meteorite, Webster stated. The article's moniker comes from a listing of locations round Bar Harbor, Maine — the naming conference for the area the place Curiosity is at present working, he added.
Ames Knob is about Four inches large by 5.5 inches lengthy (10 by 14 centimeters). It is the fourth area rock Curiosity has discovered on Mars, mission staff members stated. In Might 2014, the rover rolled up on two giant iron meteorites often called Littleton and Lebanon; the latter is about 7 toes (2 meters) large. And late final yr, Curiosity studied a golf-ball-size area rock known as Egg Rock.
The SUV-size Curiosity landed inside Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater in August 2012. The rover's observations quickly confirmed that Gale hosted a long-lasting, doubtlessly liveable lake-and-stream system within the historic previous.
Curiosity reached the bottom of the three.Four-mile-high (5.5 km) Mount Sharp, which rises from Gale Crater's heart, in September 2014 after a 14-month trek. Ever since, the six-wheeled robotic has been working its manner up the mountain's foothills, studying the rock layers for clues in regards to the historic Martian setting.
Mission scientists hope this gradual ascent will assist them perceive how the Pink Planet modified so dramatically over the eons, from a comparatively heat and moist world way back to the chilly and dry place it's in the present day.
The meteorites discovered by Curiosity — and by the rover's smaller, older cousins, Spirit and Alternative — might support on this quest, stated ChemCam principal investigator Roger Wiens, of Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory in New Mexico.
"We hope that the meteorites will be capable to inform us some details about the Mars setting, comparable to whether or not they fell on land or in water, or how dense the ambiance was once they fell," Wiens advised House.com through electronic mail.
Editor's notice: This story was up to date at three p.m. EST to incorporate extra particulars on the scale of the Ames Knob meteorite on Mars from NASA.
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